Mini-Review: I'm pretty sure there is a brilliant movie hiding in a bad one here. It brazenly illustrates the religiosity we all knew hid in films like Close Encounters and 2001, as well as Apocalypse-genre films. That it pisses off most everyone with its theological bait-and-switch is fucking fascinating.

Mini-Review: When this won the Oscar for Best Picture I threw my car keys at the screen. Spawning a horde of also bad inter-narrative faux-documentary melodramas, the story is akin to intellectual masturbation: it feels good in the moment, but no matter what you do is not as good as the real thing (in this case: thinking). Crash has caustic contempt for its audience, with no real moral other than we are all racist (Yes! You can be too!), so deal. Fuck you, movie.

Mini-Review: Show summary: punk-era Sogo Ishii raped Andy Warhol, shat a son, that son married Freud's mother, took LSD and decided to rewrite Neon Genesis Evangelion. And that only scratches the surface of this surreal and ultimately hypnotic descent into the existential macabre, but one painted with bold primaries and Looney Tunes logic. There's even an extended South Park reference! and is therefore pure gold.

Mini-Review: "It is easy to go down to hell; Night and Day the Gates of Dark Death stand wide; But to climb back up again, to retrace ones steps to the open air, there lies the problem, the difficult task." -Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI. Yet, "The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." -John Milton. The film's pluses and minuses lie in the contradiction.

Mini-Review: Pixar is the only American animation studio that can take some of our most iconic characters, have them swim in existentialism, get tortured by a villain who refuses redemption, and send them to a literal hell and back - but do it with such undeniable tact, grace and aplomb nobody even bats an eye. Actually, it might make the ending that much more stirring. It's a good thing there are credits videos for those... um, other people, clearly... who teared up.